I was watching a show on the Science Channel last night that attempts to take on and debunk the Moon landings CT narrative. It was a fairly interesting show, though I think I could do as good a job at debunking most of that stuff off the top of my head. At any rate, during the show they sort of went on a tangent to look into a fairly convoluted branch of one of the CT narratives and, doing so, made an assertion that there was (or is, I wasn’t sure) clear evidence that Wernher von Braun was not only a Nazi (I knew he was in the party) but an officer in the SS (an SS Major is what was claimed), and possibly a war criminal. In fact, they were claiming that many of the German rocket scientists used in the early US rocket program were Nazi’s, SS members and war criminals, and that NASA covered this all up (this is to demonstrate that NASA can and has covered up ugly stuff in the past for their own ends).
I did a quick Google search, but either my Google-Fu is weak today or I’m not using the right search terms, as I get a lot of stuff about von Braun talking to this SS officer or that one, but nothing about him being an SS major or war criminal. I don’t recall the person relating all of this, but she was an older woman who worked for CNN in the past as one of their top reporters (I haven’t tried to look her up, just going by memory here) and she broke the story in the 90’s, but no idea what level of evidence there is or how conclusive. Figured I’d ask here.
Wernher von Braun was indeed a member of the Allgemeine SS. He was pressured into joining by associates of Himmler, who wanted to get political operatives inside the German rocket program. There is no evidence that he actually participated in SS activities in any meaningful way, and I haven’t seen anything credible to suggest he was a war criminal.
ETA: He did get promoted to the rank of Stormbanfuhrer (spelled wrong I am sure) which would be roughly equivalent to a Major.
I think it would be impossible for Von Braun *not *to be a Nazi and it is a certainty that his weapons programs made use of slave labour.
Enthusiastic nazi support, SS activity and actual brutality by him or on his orders seems to be less certain. Though nothing about high-ranking German officials of that era would be surprising.
Thanks all. I knew he was in the NAZI party…as Novelty Bobble said, it would have been impossible for him to have risen as far or gotten as involved in the rocket program if he hadn’t. I hadn’t heard about him being an SS officer though, or this thing about war crimes. Though, obviously, if Jewish slave labor was used in the rocket production he was overseeing, this was almost certainly where the war crime part comes in. I doubt it was NASA covering things up (not much of a cover up, since I did know a lot of this already), but the US government when they brought the German scientists over to get our own rocket program, er, off the ground so to speak.
I concur. There was a lot of hand waving going on post WWII between the US and the Soviet Union. Clearly von Braun used slave labor to build his rockets and he knew it.
Yeah, I’m not sure there were many major German engineering initiatives in the war era that wouldn’t have used slave labour where it was practical to do so.
I’ve no doubt that the USA or Russian powers would seek to whitewash the reputations of those German assets they gave sanctuary to.
Von Braun visited Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp (which was a significant component of his supply chain) at least twice. It would have been impossible for him not to notice the conditions, which were atrocious even by late WWII German camp standards. (Death rate over 33%, possibly much higher-for starters). Despite that, he was ( according to testimony) involved in discussions on enslaving more workers to add to the camp. For that alone, he is a war criminal. He wasn’t some reluctant SS member. He had bought in.
It is fairly easily verifiable that Nazis were employed and their past laundered by all allied parties after the war, but especially the USSR and the US. As conspiracy theories go, it is much like a ct about a congressman driving a car off a bridge and just going home instead of calling police - we know it happened. Some CT go overboard on specific persons involved, or the extent of the white-washing program. And it is exactly zero proof of faking a moon landing. It’s comparing apples and usb drives.
No doubt about any of that. But if you want to condemn him for playing along, you do have to explain what else he could have done without getting hauled out and shot. Not many who resisted the Nazis lived to tell about it. And, you do have to look at what else he did than just play along, and there just wasn’t anything significant.
He also arranged, along with the bulk of his team, to surrender to the Americans instead of the Russians or British, because they’d be more able to pursue rocketry there. That was what mattered to him. Was that a character flaw? Maybe, but he survived and thrived because of it.
Many Germans who didn’t actively participate in slave labor, target group persecution or extermination were not shot. There were Wehrmacht and even SS personnel refusing KZ and Sondergruppen duty, without being shot. Actively resisting was dangerous, sure, but not demanding more people people be enslaved in atrocious circumstances and frankly unproductive set-ups - that isn’t actively resisting.
Beyond all this, he actively and enthusiastically built weapons whose primary purpose was to cause terror to civilian populations. An overriding, but thankfully unfulfilled goal of the Nazi rocket program, was to develop ICBMs to terrorize the people of the US mainland.
Von Braun knew exactly what was going on yet still chose to help. He is a criminal. Even Heisenberg, plausibly, tried to thwart Hitler’s most egregious plans.
In 1943 he wanted to get married (in the event, the engagement fell through). As an SS officer he had to get permission from the SS Race and Settlement Office. His application forms survive and there’s a photo of the covering letter to Himmler in Michael Neufeld’s thorough Von Braun (Knopf, 2007). It’s signed by him and clearly states his rank at the time as Hauptsturmfűhrer.
(Neufeld generally goes though the whole matter in exhaustive detail.)
there is a “top secrets of ww2” type of episode that used to show on discovery and the history channel on him
von Braun was a rocketry geek who didn’t give much of a damn about the outside world and pretty much thought anyone who wasn’t Werner von Braun were drooling idiots and played along with who and whatever could get him what he needed to make his beloved rockets and theories work
and he sort of used an extortion tactic over the locations of the useable rockets to totally get pardoned by the allies … not that they wanted to he just made agreements where they had to
to get the locations of the rockets before the Russians did
a few people he worked with even claimed he was sheltered to the point of he didn’t know they were being used to kill people cause no one bothered to tell him …at that point hed not been outside of a lab in 2 years …all he knew was some had reached london…
Haubtsturmführer is captain-equivalent, but iirc he continued to be promoted, ending up at Major-equivalent. He joined the SS twice- first time in ‘33 or ‘34 iirc, and a second time in ‘40. He claimed it was a formality, and that he never wore the uniform. Then a picture showed up with him in uniform (and with Himmler, for extra fun) - but, you see, amazingly, that time that picture was taken, that was the only time he ever wore the uniform. So not lying about that or his entire Nazi history. By the way, Nazi is used here in the strictest sense - he became a party member in ‘37. That was by no means some sort of requirement: many people in the military and defense industry never joined and had no negative consequences. He was a Nazi, SS member and war criminal. It is a stain on America’s history that he became critical in the space program.
YEs, recall that when the USA invaded Iraq they cleverly banned all Bath party members from participating in the occupation government or civil service. This plan was not well-thought out, since apparently anyone wanting to get anywhere in the civil service had to be a member of the party, so essentially the removed from participating in the government and the civil service anyone with any real experience - which did not help the outcome. This is not much different than the Soviets or the Nazis - if you declined to join the party, you were suspect. von Braun was involved in a major weapons program in the middle of a major war, he was in fact a key part of the team and one of the leaders - it would be surprising if he was not co-opted into the armed forces in some way. If he had declined to join the party, he would have been relegated to some other task, not his beloved rocketry. If he expressed reservations about how the fatherland was making its way to victory, he would have been suspect; if he expressed any concern about the working conditions of the “subhuman” prisoners - Jews, Slavs, Romany, communists and other dissidents - he certainly would have been labelled a troublemaker .
he did what he did to get his beloved rockets made. Unsurprisingly, when there’s a weapons application, resources appear to make things happen. Technically he was guilty of war crimes, as was anyone overseeing an enterprise using slave camp labour. From what I understand, unlike say, Schindler, he was not in any position to dictate any details of the working conditions, nor the selection of workers, nor the resources such as food available to the workers… And if he walked away from the project, and got himself best case drafted and sent to the Eastern Front, the rocket program would go on…
There’s a difference between engaging in war crimes and building terrible weapons of war. Von Braun may have been a criminal because of the use of slave labor, but not for his building of ‘terror weapons’. Every country in the war built ‘terror weapons’, and the U.S. built the most terrifying of all. If Von Braun was guilty because he built the V-2, then what were the scientists on the Manhattan Project guilty of?
Building weapons, even terrible ones, is a legitimate activity in warfare. Von Braun bears no guilt for that at all. The other stuff, perhaps.